Recently I had an awakening that I didn't need to spend $115 every month to use a phone. Imagine that. After a quick trip to AT&T, I changed my plan from the grandfathered-in unlimited plan to just 1GB per month. With my average data usage being right around three or four gigs per month, I knew I had to adjust my data spending habits. Here is the list of apps and the amount of cellular data that I have used over the course of a month with unlimited data. I've omitted the less common apps and ones that used less than one megabyte.

App Store - 1.0 GB

Calendar - 3.6 MB

Chrome - 477 MB

Contacts - 6.5 MB

Drive - 1.6 MB

Elevate - 17.2 MB

Facebook - 898 MB

Facetime - 2.5 MB

Google Maps - 199 MB

Google Inbox - 89.2 MB

Instagram - 21.5 MB

iTunes Store - 42.2 MB

Maps - 12.6 MB

Facebook Messenger - 35.5 MB

Pinterest - 7.6 MB

Safari - 58.8 MB

Simple Bank - 6.4 MB

Spotify - 369 MB

Uber - 11.2 MB

As you can see from the bolded apps, only a handful of them take nearly all of the bandwidth. The 80-20 rule is happily at play here. The biggest offenders being the App Store, Chrome, Facebook, Google Maps, and Spotify. Now let's get started trimming down these cellular bytes.

1. Always Connect to Wi-Fi

This is an obvious one, but worth mentioning. When I was on an unlimited plan, I used wifi here and there, but didn't make it a priority. Why would I?! But now, I connect to wifi networks whenever I can, which makes my home and work data usage nonexistent. If you're at or near a cafe, or at a friend's house, pull open your wifi settings and log in! It will save tons of data in the long run. Even if you're just watching a couple Vines or Facebook videos.

2. Look Up

Again, when I had unlimited data, I would always be checking my Facebook feed or navigating in Google Maps when I was walking around. At these times, connecting to wifi isn't an option, so every byte comes out of your budget. With this new 1GB limit, however, I found I was challenging myself to be more attentive in the real world. I started looking up the location of a place before leaving wifi and forcing myself to actually engage my memory to find my destination. Doing so has been helping with my memory and attention. It's healthy to not be stimulated sometimes.

3. App Store

The only app that reached a gigabyte for me was the app that sells apps. Part of this is from app downloads themselves, but most of it comes from app updates. For every app that you download, it then downloads many times it's own size in updates over time. You can disable app updates over cellular data to prevent this from happening automatically. Also, just browsing the app store and watching the preview videos takes a good piece of bandwidth.

4. Google Maps

Clocking in at 200MB, this wasn't the worst offender, but there's a technique that can save you most of this space. In the app, if you search for an area such as "Seattle, WA" or "Capitol Hill," you can slide up the bottom bar and tap "Save" to have the actual map data saved locally. This frees you up once you're out of wifi range. Keep in mind that data is still used while searching for anything or getting directions. But at least it won't have to load the map data every time it opens.

5. Spotify

Depending on how much music you listen to on the go, this can easily get into the gigabytes if you're not careful. The easy workaround is to sign up for Spotify Premium (now you can share 2-5 subscriptions for $10 + $5 for each additional account!) and save your playlists locally. This could minimize 100% of your cellular music data.

6. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest

Just, stop. There's no secret to reducing the data usage of these apps apart from using them less. The less you start using these apps while out and about, the more you'll find yourself engaging with other humans. You can still take as many photos as you'd like, but just wait until you're home to go post-crazy.

With just a little bit of work, you can fairly painlessly go from 5GB+ every month to just a few hundred megabytes, saving you $1,000+ in the process.